by Meg Ripley
Aside from that, Sarah Wells was stubborn to the core. When that girl wanted something, nothing could stand in her way. That’s one of the reasons I’d been more than happy to take off years ago. Sure, I’d known she was absolutely off-limits, and I’d done my damnedest to ignore her, but the night she’d come onto me full force had just about done me in.
Not long before that incident, her father had presented me with an opportunity for a life different from the one I’d been forging for myself, and while I’d needed time to think about it, that night had made the decision for me.
If I didn’t get the hell out of town, I likely would have ended up behind bars or with one hell of an angry father after me who happened to know about a thousand different torture techniques—not the kind of father a twenty-two-year-old guy wanted to piss off.
Okay, so yeah, Sarah was obviously different from every other woman out there. Of course, she was. But did that mean sex with her would be worth the effort I’d have to put in?
Fuck yes, it would. The answer came screaming out of every crevice of my mind. And with her quiet moans, soft body and fiery eyes fresh in my memory, who was I to argue?
Alright, I had to come up with a plan. I knew from her response earlier that at least part of her was on board. Her body definitely knew what it wanted, but she’d panicked.
If I had to take a guess, I’d say she wasn’t really used to having casual sex. She was probably the ‘serious relationship’ type that didn’t even start to think about it until she was sure the guy was in it for the long haul. Unfortunately, I was definitely more of a truck stop than a long-haul kind of guy. But all I had to do was get her to see there was nothing wrong with a little meaningless, mutual gratification every once in a while. From there, it would be a simple thing to get her naked, and get myself cock-deep in that wicked body.
So…how would a guy go about getting a ‘serious relationship’ kind of woman to give herself over to a casual weekend fling? There was no point in playing games and trying to woo her into bed. Sarah would go running in the other direction the moment she figured out what I was up to.
So, it was simple. No lies, no games. Be honest, be blunt.
I wanted to fuck her, and I had no doubt that a good part of her wanted the same.
****
I pulled into the hospital parking lot at exactly five minutes before eleven the next morning. I’d called the hospital and had no trouble finding out that Sarah was in fact working that day, and she wouldn’t be on her lunch break until eleven-o-clock. I had contemplated waiting until after her shift was over to approach her, but I figured if I could stir up a few sparks and leave her smoldering for the rest of her shift…well, hopefully she’d be ready to burst into flames not long after.
I nodded to all the folks who recognized me as I made my way across the lot and through the emergency room entrance, and greeted the ancient figure at the triage desk who must have been there since the Declaration of Independence. The old woman motioned me through when I asked about Sarah, and I found her there quickly, though not in the way I’d expected.
I’d anticipated seeing her bent over a patient’s sprained ankle or inspecting a set of tonsils with a tongue depressor. But the woman I found was calling out orders, examining x-rays and wielding a nasty looking needle that she jabbed into the chest of the man lying lifeless in front of her without a moment’s hesitation. Her back was straight, her eyes were bright, and it was only seconds later when the man coughed, spluttered, and took a wheezing breath, that I saw her shoulders relax—the only proof she’d been under pressure at all.
The woman was confident, competent…and absolutely mesmerizing. I’d never seen Sarah so much in her element, and right then, I understood without a doubt why she’d gone into medicine. She was made for it.
I hung back as she examined the patient further, in part to maintain the patient’s privacy, but also to give myself a moment to collect my thoughts. It was a side of Sarah I’d never seen, and I wasn’t used to surprises. I didn’t like them, in fact. In my line of work, they weren’t welcome, so I’d gotten very good at knowing everything I could in any particular scenario.
I really hadn’t expected Sarah to ever be able to throw me for a loop like that. But thrown I was, though I wasn’t going to let it distract me from my plan.
So, I shrugged away from the wall and she caught sight of me right away. And I think because she was still so very much in her element, my presence there didn’t faze her as much as I would have expected. Her eyes bulged slightly, but she caught herself quickly and nodded in my direction. Still chatting with a co-worker, she remained there for a moment, but she kept glancing over at me. And the moment the woman headed toward one of the curtained-off beds, Sarah walked toward me, almost apprehensive in her step but determined, nonetheless.
“What are you doing here?”
No niceties. Straight to the point. That was fine with me.
“Lunch,” I replied, equally as candid.
“You’ve come to have lunch…with me…in the hospital cafeteria? That’s rather brave of you given the rumors about the food, isn’t it?”
“I figure I’ll be okay. If it makes me sick, there’ll be plenty of doctors around to pump my stomach before the wretched stuff kills me.”
“Seriously, Declan, why are you here?” Her voice grew quieter, and she started edging us toward a staff room beyond the emergency area.
“I told you, I’m here to have lunch with you.” I didn’t bother keeping my voice down. And that meant she could either have the whole room hear our conversation—at least my end of it—or she could agree to have lunch. And I could see she knew it, too, even if that knowledge made her scowl at me in irritation.
She breathed a resigned sigh, waved to a woman on the other side of the room to let her know she was leaving, and then motioned down the hall toward the cafeteria.
“Look, I’m sorry about last night,” she apologized as she slipped into a chair in the near-empty cafeteria. “It was a mistake,” she told me bluntly. “So…why are you here?”
“I’m here because I plan on picking up where we left off last night.”
It was my turn to throw her for a loop because she certainly hadn’t been expecting that. She stared at me for a moment, as if she were trying to figure out some other meaning to what I’d just said, but finding none, she began to push the food on her plate back and forth with her fork, her concentration on the task seemingly complete, if I didn’t know her better.
“There’s nothing wrong with two consenting adults indulging in a mutual attraction, Sarah, and we both know there’s plenty of attraction going on here.”
“Declan, your interest is flattering, really, and I have no problem with casual flings and the like. But this—you and me—is a bad idea.”
I didn’t get the sense she was lying when she said she didn’t have a problem with casual flings, which meant she was either doing one hell of a job deceiving me—unlikely—or I’d misjudged her qualms with the previous night. I’d say that wasn’t possible either, but after seeing Sarah in action today, I couldn’t deny that I’d been quick to sum her up based on what I’d known about her from years ago.
“Once upon a time, I had a really big crush on you, and I got caught up in that last night. But I won’t ever be a notch on your bedpost, Declan. Let’s face it; we’re different people. It was good to see you again. I’m happy to see you’ve done well for yourself, and I wish you the best.”
She stood then, her cafeteria tray in hand, and nodded to me. In her mind, that was the end of the conversation; there was nothing more to be said.
I nodded back, willing to concede for the time being, but it didn’t escape my notice that her hands were trembling, making the utensils on her tray clank quietly against her plate. And her step wasn’t nearly as steady as it had been before as she walked away and dumped her entire meal in the trash.
Well, that mission was a total failure. But maybe it was for the b
est. I’d lived by rules in my work to stay alive, and I’d carved out a careful set of rules when it came to women to stay free. One run-in with Sarah and I had been willing to toss the rulebook in the trash? What would be next? Hand over the other rulebook and play Russian roulette on the job?
No, I told myself as I strode out of the building. This was definitely for the best. I drove out of the lot three minutes later on the bike I’d managed to wrangle from the local mechanic, thank god. But as I pulled up to the motel, my mind was still right where it had been since I’d spotted Sarah in the coffee shop yesterday morning. What the hell was it about this woman?
She was perfectly fine with casual sex, just not with me. For a guy who didn’t get turned down very often, the knowledge wasn’t terribly welcomed. But maybe that explained my persistent interest in her: she was a challenge, and an unexpected one.
The Sarah I’d known would have fallen helplessly into my bed, but this woman, though obviously experiencing the same attraction I was, wanted to run in the opposite direction. Had that somehow made her more appealing? And if so, would it really be breaking any rules if what I was after wasn’t the off-limits woman, but the challenge itself?
Okay, so getting Sarah into bed wasn’t going to be a five-minute job, but damn it, victory was going to be sweet when I won.
****
Hours later, I was standing on her doorstep. I made sure I’d given her plenty of time to arrive home and de-stress. I knocked, ready to get to work and win that gorgeous piece of ass.
When she opened the door, her hair was pulled back in a messy bun. She was still wearing her scrubs and her eyes were red and swollen like she’d been crying.
“What are you doing here, Declan?” she asked in a weaker voice than I’d heard from her in a long time.
“Bad day?”
“Yeah.” She closed her mouth as if she wasn’t going to say anymore, but then sighed. “There was a family in a car accident on the highway…the woman didn’t make it.”
Okay, this was heavy. It would have been bad enough if it was just the patient she’d lost, but her mother had died in an accident when Sarah was just eight years old—or so she was led to believe. Her father had passed not long ago in a similar way. No doubt, she hadn’t been able to avoid drudging up old feelings. If I was smart, I’d offer my condolences for the woman who died today and get the hell out of there.
But I wasn’t—at least not right at that moment.
“I’ll order a pizza; you go grab a hot shower,” I told her. Fuck, what the hell was I doing?
“Thanks, Declan, but it’s really not necessary. It’s part of the job, you know?”
Part of the job.
I’d taken more lives than I cared to remember, snuffed them out without a moment’s thought because that was ‘part of my job.’ But Sarah…she saved lives, or at least, she tried to. How many times had she held a life in her hands? How many patients had she lost despite her capable hands? And how many times had she cried alone afterward with no one there to comfort her?
“Go on and take a nice, hot shower. I’ll take care of dinner,” I told her more gently this time, laying a hand on her shoulder and nudging her in the direction of the bathroom down the hall. I resisted the urge to follow her, using considerable effort to steer myself toward the kitchen instead.
I phoned in an order as soon as I heard her turn on the water, doing my damnedest not to think about the woman five yards away. She would’ve been naked by then, probably stepping beneath the showerhead. It didn’t take much to imagine the hot water cascading down her naked flesh, making her smooth skin slippery…
Shit! This is a really bad idea, I told myself. The woman could use someone to talk to after a wretched day, but I was definitely not the guy for the job. Nevertheless, I’d walked right into this mess. I couldn’t exactly turn around and leave—at least, not without earning the title of the biggest asshole ever.
I searched the cupboards for a couple of glasses and checked the fridge for something that had a high enough alcohol content to soothe away her troubles. After finding a half-empty bottle of tequila, I reached for the wine instead. Sure, I wanted Sarah naked and writhing beneath me, but it wouldn’t have been much of a victory if she’d been too drunk to remember anything in the morning. And then I waited, pacing back and forth across the small space between the kitchen cupboards, trying to figure how best to extricate myself from the messy situation.
She emerged from the bathroom before the pizza had arrived, dressed in a pair of leggings and a thin, black T-shirt that hung off one shoulder. It was a casual outfit, but she somehow still managed to look like sex personified.
Her wet hair hung down her back, the dark tresses almost black in the dim lighting of the hallway. Her green eyes were no longer swollen, as if she’d used the time to stiffen her spine and bury whatever bad memories the day had dug up. She smiled up at me softly, nervously, as if she was embarrassed that I’d seen her with her guard down. She was…beautiful.
The pizza arrived just then, and we ate in silence for a few minutes.
“I’m not always like this,” she said out of the blue. “I mean, I knew when I started out there’d be people I couldn’t help. Once in a while, though…”
“I get it. So, what made you do it? Become a doctor, I mean.”
“I guess I just wanted my life to matter, to make a difference, if not on a grand scale, then on an individual one. At the end of my life, I can know there are people who are alive because of me; families that weren’t ripped apart that might have been otherwise…you know, all the usual stuff that drives people toward medicine.”
She brushed it off, as if her reasons were commonplace, but I don’t think she had any idea how uncommon they really were. Maybe because I’d spent the past decade seeking out the worst kind of scum on the planet, but I was all too aware of what drove people: greed and power, mostly, and very seldomly, a desire to truly help others.
“And what about you, Declan. What was it that finally made you decide to follow in your father’s footsteps?”
Right. She was under the impression I’d taken up where my father left off in the family’s multi-million-dollar empire. Little did she know, it wasn’t in my father’s footsteps I’d followed, but hers. And there was absolutely no way I was going to enlighten her since she also had no idea what her father had actually spent his life doing. Still, I had to give her some kind of answer.
“It just seemed like the natural progression of things, I guess,” I replied, and it was true enough.
The family business had never fit, and I’d railed against their expectations, spending far too long getting into trouble just to thwart them.
And I was damn good at it.
It was on one of those ventures into unlawful activity that Sarah’s father had slid into the passenger seat of a sportscar I’d just lifted. “You know, son, have you ever given any consideration to what you could do with your skills if you put them to better use?” he’d asked as he fastened his seatbelt like we were about to take a Sunday drive.
Given that the car wasn’t exactly mine and I was on a deadline, I couldn’t sit there in stunned silence, so I’d revved the engine and drove forty miles to the drop-off point. Erik hadn’t said a word the entire way, and I had absolutely no idea how I was going to explain his presence to my contact who’d been waiting for the car. But I did…easily. The lie had come like second nature, and Erik played right along.
The even weirder part came after when he motioned in the direction of his car, parked not thirty feet from the drop-off point. He’d known where I was headed from the beginning, and while I should have been panicking, I wasn’t. I was fascinated, caught up trying to figure out how he’d tracked me down, how he’d known exactly what I was up to.
And then he’d told me. Not a single person in town, not his daughter, and not even his own father knew what he was up to. But just like that, the course of my life had swerved in a completely unexpected directio
n. For the first time, I’d felt like I was right where I belonged, doing what I’d been born to do.
I’d become a vigilante.
“I suppose sometimes you just know when something’s right, don’t you?” she asked, and there was definitely a double innuendo in her question. Her mood had changed, and she’d begun to lean toward me, though I don’t think she was even aware of the movement.
It figured. Smooth lines and avid pursuit did nothing to win her over. But quasi-intimate conversation over pizza and wine, and her resistance crumbled away.
“Sarah…” I knew I should get the hell out of there. She’d been emotionally compromised…she’d been upset…vulnerable…
She put her hand on my thigh, and it sent a jolt of heat through my body. And by the way she froze, I could tell she hadn’t expected to feel so much in response, but she did. The sexual energy that had hung in the air between us had found a route inside her, straight through her fingers when she touched me.
But that didn’t seem to stop her.
Her hand started to move, lightly at first, grazing up and down in small circles. I gritted my jaw against the wave of fire that was quickly overwhelming whatever meager resistance I could muster.
“I want this, Declan,” she breathed quietly. I could hear it loud and clear in her soft tone—desire, hunger, longing. Her eyes meeting mine, all the while her hand continued to move, her nails grazing along my thigh this time as she moved higher.
Oh hell, what man could possibly be expected to walk away? Just then, she pulled her hand back, and I breathed a rugged sigh, part in relief and part disappointment. She didn’t move for a moment, and I waited, not trusting myself to speak just yet. And hell, I didn’t want to go back to talking. I wanted to touch her…to taste her.
“I know I shouldn’t want you…but I do,” she spoke louder, a split second before she lunged for my mouth.